Broadband Is This Generation’s Highway System, FCC Chief Says

PALO ALTO, California — Call it the summer of broadband.

Early this week the new FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school classmate of President Barack Obama’s, toured California in support of the FCC’s ongoing attempt to craft the nation’s first broadband plan, putting in appearances at a San Francisco public housing project Sunday and a children’s hospital in Palo Alto on Monday.

While ostensibly a fact-finding mission, Genachowski’s trip — along with the 18 broadband hearings the FCC will hold before the end of summer — is intended to send a message that the FCC is planning a very ambitious proposal for the country’s IT infrastructure, a plan that goes beyond simply giving grants to get YouTube and Twitter to farmers.

“Broadband is our generation’s infrastructure challenge,” Genachowski said at a meeting of executives, doctors and health companies at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford on Monday. “It is as important as electricity and highways were for past generations.”

Those are ambitious, if not audacious, comparisons to programs that the government spent hundreds of billions of dollars over decades of commitment. By contrast, the stimulus package from February — which put aside $7 billion for broadband grants and loans — marks the largest federal commitment to broadband deployment.

But ambition is just what Obama and Congress asked for, according to Genachowski. He pointed out Monday that when Congress ordered the FCC to deliver a plan next February, they specified that the plan was supposed to do more than just encourage the spread and adoption of broadband. The third prong was to create a plan that enhanced national priorities, including health, anti-terrorism, education and disaster preparedness.

That explains why Genachowski suited up in hospital scrubs Monday morning, along with Silicon Valley’s tech-savvy Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, to see first-hand how broadband technology is helping doctors operate on sick children.

Eshoo, a Democrat, sits on an influential House telecom subcommittee and was ebullient in her praise for Genachowski, saying she’s eager for an effective FCC, a reference to the commission when it was under former head Kevin Martin, whose management style angered many.

“There was not a vision at the FCC, and people don’t realize the power of the FCC,” Eshoo said. “Words from the FCC will walk into people’s lives.”

The video of Eshoo and Genachowski watching the surgery was piped to a conference room of hospital executives, media and aides. Unfortunately, there was no sound – a technical glitch that perhaps illustrates the still nascent use of IT in the nation’s health care system, where the notion of e-mailing one’s doctors and setting up an appointment online seems cutting edge.

But the Packard Children’s hospital has IT successes as well, according to the hospital’s doctors, all of whom are Stanford Medical School faculty who handle cases too difficult or specialized for many hospitals.

For instance, Dr. Darius Moshfeghi showed off a technology system that saves ophthalmologists from having to drive to hospitals where the babies are, don headgear with magnifying glasses and then sketch out the blood vessels in a premature baby’s eyes, looking for abnormalities that indicate retinopathy, the leading cause of blindness in babies.

The technique is laborious, the drawings crude and the travel is inefficient.

Under a system championed by Moshfeghi, a special camera installed at a hospital instead takes six images of the baby’s eyes and email them to the ophthalmologist. The doctor can then easily track the blood vessels over time, schedule surgery at the proper moment and have photographic proof in case of a malpractice suit.

Dr. Dan Murphy uses ISDN phone lines to connect to rural hospitals that don’t have a cardiologist. When babies are born with a suspected heart condition, the baby’s doctor can immediately connect to the Packard Children’s hospital, where a video and audio conferencing session lets the cardiologist direct the EKG and see the results live.

From there the cardiologist can either reassure the doctor and family that all is well, or in the worst case, recommend that a chopper be sent immediately to transport the child to a critical care hospital.

But unfortunately, even cheaper broadband or technology may not be enough to persuade hospitals to upgrade to new technology because the nation’s byzantine health insurance reimbursement system often won’t pay for e-consults.

“We lose money on telemedicine,” Packard’s CEO Christopher Dawes, referring to the fact that many insurance companies and even Medicare often do not cover e-consultations.

Telemedicine can also costs hospitals revenue if visits are shortened by more efficient use of technology.

Genachowski was impressed by the hospital technology, but seemed eager for data that he could use to prove that IT — particularly broadband — saved lives and money. If proven, it would be a way to persuade the country that some policy — whether that be subsidies, market regulation or grants and loans — was necessary to speed up the nation’s still sluggish and pricey internet connections.

“We are just scratching surface of what broadband technology can do for the country,” Genachowski said. “I don’t think enough people appreciate the very real, practical benefits that a 21st century telecom infrastructure can provide.”

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